You can’t spoil a dud, so what follows isn’t a spoiler. But brace yourselves. At the end of Munich, Robert Harris’s best-selling thriller about behind-the-scenes machinations at the disastrous peace talks, a heroic young German official has collaborated with a heroic young Brit to smuggle a crucial document to Neville Chanberlain. This document records Hitler in his own words laying out his plans for a Europe cruelly pushed around to meet Nazi expansion goals. Chamberlain doesn’t give a damn. He says Hitler’s been saying that stuff since Mein Kampf and who cares.
Hundreds of pages of would-be hair-raising exploits to get that piece of paper from one place to another, and then the plot falls on its face. Because of the human factor, I suppose. It’s not like Chamberlain’s reaction is so far-fetched. In a bleak comedy, a dark treatment of history’s blindness and man’s folly, the scene could play quite well. In a by-the-book thriller, it’s a screw-up. A thriller with a pointless MacGuffin is a thriller without point.
As a whole Munich is so perfunctory it’s like an exercise in sentence completion. The historical figures are sketched in; the others are barely there at all. The German and the Brit seem much the same, except the German has long legs; reminders bob up at scattered intervals and disappear. The Brit’s private life is simply that his wife’s doing it with some other guy, a subplot that takes up about five pages. The wife’s name is Pamela, which doesn’t help with their snippets of clipped dialogue—one imagines the syllables “Pam-uh-luh” languishing in the back and forth.
The writing’s easy to read but not worth the time. You can chug along and at the end nothing’s taken place that you feel, nothing’s been described so that you see it, no thought’s been expressed that brings forth some new understanding. Bits of info here and there indicate that Chamberlain wasn’t so bad. We’re told of Britain’s puny air defenses at that critical juncture, we hear about Chamberlain’s hard bargaining on behalf of the Czechs forced out of the Sudetenland. But they’re refugees. What will they do with the cows and pigs and horses and chickens they’re allowed to bring along? No one seems to have thought about this, not Chamberlain and not Harris. Possibly Hitler was laughing up his sleeve the whole time.
Harris wrote three excellent page-turners that bring to life the people and desperate political struggles of another land and another epoch. These are the Cicero novels, all of them shrewd, vivid, and thrilling, all of them filled with historical figures who seem like people you may have met but not like modern-day Brits or Americans instead of ancient Romans. Those three books have fooled me time and again. With Pompeii and An Officer and a Spy and Enigma and Archangel, I settled down to fast-moving narratives that would make my bus trip unroll painlessly. Instead, I found decently formed sentences that added up to a light sleep.
Now Munich and that’s my last time being fooled. No more Robert Harris. Like the Brit who saw Chamberlain snort away a historical warning, I’ve learned my lesson and must cut a new path. I’m going back to John Le Carré, the young Brit’s leaving government and joining the RAF—good show. “Everything has to change, Pamela,” he says, very Leslie Howard. “You, me, everything.” Try that on, Pam-uh-luh. Meanwhile, I’m going to read something good.